While
�virtue� remained a crucial sign of moral and material worth in the long
eighteenth century, shifting politico-economic and religious structures
propelled English writers to redefine virtue as a dynamic global concept,
emerging via traffic between times and places, rather than as a timeless
standard or as a gendered code. Compared to wealthier, more powerful Eastern
empires, early modern England lacked empirical evidence of its virtue. As a
result, writers such as Margaret Cavendish and Jonathan Swift turned to
examples from the past (ancient Rome and Sparta) and the East (Arabia, China,
and Japan) to imagine sustainable models of English virtue for the future.
Because of England�s tenuous position on the world stage, writers represented
virtue alternately as a future ideal, the action required to bring that ideal
to fruition, and the divine favor or influence driving that action.
Ubiquitous in the period�s novels, poems, political and scientific treatises,
and travelogues, the rhetoric of virtue encoded and responded to the
contradictions of global modernity.